What We Lived Through
by FiddlingCrispo
Summary: The boys were finally rescued. On the cruise and en route back to England, Ralph realised his world was never the same again. Post-canon conflicts between Ralph and Jack. Ralph's failed attempt at self-healing. Ralph/Jack


What We Lived Through, a Lord of the Flies fanfic

**Summary:** The boys were finally rescued. On the cruise and en route back to England, Ralph realised his world was never the same again. Post-canon conflicts between Ralph and Jack. Ralph's failed attempt at self-healing.

**Disclaimer: **We've been through this many a time, but I do take pains to type these again because it is a talisman that will help me fend off a potential lawsuit from Mr William Golding. (grins)

The trim cruise sailed on, white and tranquil against a fading tapestry of black smoke and searing debris - the last of the island that once hosted an ersatz civilisation.

Everything about the interior of the ship was white, piercingly so, stinging in its immediacy and power to intimidate. Ralph's eyes stole around the little cabin, drifting now and then towards one of the other boys that scattered about the corners. The look on their faces was one of universal submission; the chief now resided in the shape of the neatly-clothed officer and everything he stood for. No toy of voting. No argument.

'You've been rescued. We are going back.' The voice rang in Ralph's ears like an absolution. He had to crane his neck to look back at the cremating island several times before the reality sank in; he had to glance Jack's way several times to make sure that the tall, painted figure wasn't holding the sharpened stick high above his head, laughing in his desire to shed blood. It all seems all right now. The memories are almost absurd.

No, quipped a small voice from some shadowy corner of Ralph's mind, no, you haven't been rescued the way you wanted it; something of you has burnt off along with that island. There's only soot and filth there now, and it could never come back to life again.

He shook his head, suddenly uncomfortable under the sunlight streaming in through the windowpanes. He shifted towards a pool of shadow and sat gingerly under it. The sun continued to glare a heated path onto the spot where he had hunched a moment ago. It was a heat that proclaimed neither warmth nor the ghost of boyish bustling like it used to witness. Ralph held his knees to his chest and glanced around the cabin again. The officer had gone out; there was supposedly no stranger within sight. Around him were the boys he had come to know: naked, smeared with filth and paint, indeterminable in the features. Every inch a tribe of raving savages.

He scanned each of them in the face and found he really knew none of them anymore.

To Ralph's left perched Jack. Now tugged back under the censure of etiquette, Jack's warpaint was no more menacing than a child's Halloween mask. He sat hunched forward, his hands crossed over his head, fidgeting in a seemingly distracting attempt to disentangle his matted hair. He did not meet Ralph's eye, and Ralph was way too dumbfounded at the sight of grooming to care.

The voyage was a long one. Ralph lost track of time as he sat motionless and apathetic to the crewmen's erratic visits, since he was assumed to be 'in charge of the lot' and was expected to give something of an explanation once he felt up to it. At length a sailor appeared, the one that saved Ralph's life by simply setting foot on the island in the nick of time.

'Just so you know, we'll be back in England in less than ten hours.'

All eyes turned to him. Some boys stirred; none spoke.

'And once we've got our feet planted on solid ground, they'll have to know why and how you lot ended up in _this_ state and on my ship.'

Ralph blinked. It didn't help that he just registered the man was looking directly at him, long and hard and searching. He had been on board for quite some time and hadn't bothered to wash, dress or do anything to try cleansing himself back to civilisation. Keeping up appearances never worked, let alone setting up rules and trying to make things English. He had seen to that, hadn't he?

'Will you - will you kill us?'

The question, more like a pleading, seeped out of him like blood. Ralph heard the sharp intake of breath all around him and was unfazed. They ought to have been harbouring the same suspicion, oughtn't they? Simon was now probably at the bottom of the ocean; and Piggy, with his smashed skill and unseeing eyes, falling like a sack of trash...

The sailor waved his hand, obviously dismissing Ralph's inquiry as some kind of post-trauma blather. 'You are misunderstanding me, man. I say, we'll soon be back home and people like your parents would sure like to know why you are, you know, this unkempt. Of course, it's not your fault, trapped like you were on that island. You have survived, and that says something.'

'We tried to make it right. We were in charge of ourselves at first. We could have s-survived, all of us, had we kept things that way right till the end. If only - '

Ralph's voice broke. He looked in Jack's direction, barring him with the accusation he dared not articulate. Jack's laughs, paints and the way he hacked at the sow's carcass had left a permanent scar on his brain.

'We did it,' said Jack without looking up, sounding defiant and a mite resentful. 'Nobody can deny that. There was hunting and there was hut-building, to each his own. If there wasn't the beast and the chief going lousy we'd be totally fine.'

'The beast?'

Ralph flinched at the note of incredulity in the sailor's voice. The man knows nothing. But for the beast, everything would have been all right. Yet the beast was gone, burnt down with the island. What amount of blame on the beast's part was now loaded onto Ralph and wishfully Jack.

'I was in charge of my hunting squad,' resumed Jack, paying no heed to his vicinity. 'Of course we'd go at it head-on when there's a thing like beast-hunting. Only Ralph kept butting in and saying stuff that's of no use to anyone, and when we asked him to go kill the beast himself he just shirked.'

'I didn't shirk!' Ralph shouted, unable to help himself. Suddenly he was glaring Jack full in the face and the rush of hatred came over him as though they were reliving that afternoon of breaking-apart. Jack had emerged from his shell and was now confronting Ralph as of old.

'You aren't the chief any more than you were on that burning beach a while ago!'

Ralph stared into the livid face, trying to make out the expression behind the mask of filth and paint. All he could see was rancour and passion and something that once flared vividly above a slaughtered pig and a pile of burnt-out tinder. Fear struck him like a physical blow; he swallowed his retort and shifted away.

'So you had a row about who's supposed to be chief?' the sailor shook his head. 'Honestly, boys, this shouldn't have been half as serious as you think. If there're no devastating consequences apart from burning down an island, well... Anyway, I don't suppose you really meant it when you said stuff like someone being killed.'

'Two of his lot had an accident and did their heads in,' Jack pointed at Ralph. 'Not mine, anyway. I was a proper chief.'

Ralph met the sailor's disbelieving eye and did not protest. A sense of cynical abandonment welled up and drowned him. He was not Piggy, who could talk word by word and step by step in that monotone, assertive way of his even though order and sense had fallen into ruins all around him. But what good came of that? Piggy died, as did Simon, who sealed his own fate by not playing along with anyone. Protestation wouldn't make much of a difference now. It could only single him out and make him the next victim

The cruise changed its course; Jack's thin body threw a long, curved shadow over him.

'It was an accident,' Ralph heard himself saying. 'They didn't know the terrain very well, they tumbled.' Then he lowered his head to his crossed arms and caved back to his personal bane. The truths of Piggy and Simon and that kid with the mulberry-coloured birthmark were now cremated and buried deep beneath nowhere. The island was now history, a black dot that stained an otherwise pristine page. It was smeared up, was made into a mussy patch and then scooped clean away, like a oozing chunk out of a carrion.

But the residue was always there, ingrained deep at the back of Ralph's mind, the looming memento of their adventure. No forged sedation could gloss it over; indifference only strengthens its power to haunt. Ralph pressed his forehead almost savagely into his arms. If only it could make his head open like Piggy's; it was only a glancing blow, a fleeting moment of impact that he probably wouldn't even register, and then it was black and nothingness forever.

If only that nothingness could seize him now. If only.

The long, curved shadow above him shifted, stretched, then darkened over again.

**END**

**A/N:**

I wrote this ages ago. There are several aspects that I now don't like, such as the flimsy angst and the portrayal of Jack as the unrepentant arch-villain through and through. Still, this is what I made of the canon and the way I pictured the aftermaths in a certain phase. I hope it makes an enjoyable read for you people. ;p

xx Flossy


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